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Meanland: Beautiful statistics

With a glut of 4,568 emails, many of which are links emailed from my twitter account for deeper reading, I try to focus on the task at hand. After six months you’d think I’d have lost the fascination. But what I’m learning is too great to ignore. After eight years as a stay-at-home mum, I’m hungering for conversations reminiscent of those had in London when I worked for a woman who played a leading role in shifting attitudes on disability. On Twitter are shares I have not before been privy to in such abundance. The buzz comes from journalists, writers, scientists, visual artists, digital natives and others sharing literature, publishing, innovations, climate change, equality and more. It’s huge. I am gorging. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 20-12-2011, 2 user comments

Meanland: Editors, trolls and lovers

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc

Written by Catherine Moffat on 5-12-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: For and against a digital avant-garde

poster_perdu_flarfOne of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated ‘grand narratives’, we have been more or less expected to view any attempt at challenging the status quo by either revolutionaries or radical artists as ineffectual and passé. But can the internet, the postmodernist tool par excellence, be used subversively as a means for creating confronting, cutting edge art? Can there be such a thing as a digital avant-garde? ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 28-11-2011, 15 user comments

Meanland: Copyright or wrong?

According to a recent article by Good magazine about 10 percent of American university students plagiarise from Wikipedia. Others, about 8 percent, copy from Yahoo Answers and Slideshare. These figures are based on a recent study released by Turnitin, a software program that academics use to check for plagiarism – you enter a piece of text into the program and it searches the net for a pre-existing version of that text. If the report is to be believed then, plagiarism is on the rise: 55 percent of US College presidents think so anyway. ... read more

Written by John Weldon on 11-11-2011, 17 user comments

Meanland: The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 29-06-2011, 7 user comments

Winning Meanland essay 2: The internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven.

Alice‘Why not page one?’ a son asks.
‘If you flick through and count,’ I say, ‘it’s page eleven.’

But he’s forgotten what I’ve said, absorbed in the blurred edges of Alice’s golden hair once painted with watercolours or pastels.

We tried ebooks over the summer (kindle on iPhone). The pictures were ordinary, the numberlessness was disorientating and the text too small on that piddly screen. It was decided. For the nightly family read, we will stick with tradition. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 22-06-2011, 15 user comments

Rundle on Assange

202-cover-200px1Our new edition – featuring the exquisite illustrations of Shaun Tan, an open letter from Alexis Wright, and essays from Wendy Bacon and Bob Gosford – is out and we’ll be publishing articles from it online over the next few weeks.

If you make haste with your subscribing, however, you’ll be certain of securing a copy of what is sure to be a limited edition.

‘Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take’

Written by Editorial team on 31-03-2011, No comments

Meanland: Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

Marshall-McLuhanNot a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2011, 10 user comments

Meanland: In the future, they’ll be called ‘book deletings’

HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.

borroiwng books 2Remember the library card inside the front cover (sometimes the back) that used to be taken out when you borrowed? Or the pages of date stamps glued one on top of the other, dating back to 1984, 1973 or beyond? Well, those days of sharing ageing library books are gone, and not merely because the printed text is being outshone by its digital sibling. HarperCollins announced to libraries last week, via the digital distributor OverDrive, that they were limiting the lifespan of their ebooks to 26 checkouts. OverDrive informed US libraries: ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 2-03-2011, 4 user comments

You Twit?

twitter_bird_follow_meRecently, someone of substantial literary clout asked me a question I have been dreading for some time: ‘Can we expect to hear more from you on Twitter? It can be very useful for writers.’

Oh dear. I’d been sprung. I had to admit that I don’t really get what Twitter is for if one is not overthrowing a dictatorship or having a steamy affair with Liz Hurley. I’m just not into it. And before anyone starts banging on about a generation gap, wait for it ‘peeps’, I’m a member of Gen Y. (Just. Hand me my knitting needles and show me to a Smokey

Written by Claire Zorn on 1-03-2011, 13 user comments

Wireless + public transport = win

WiFiI recently saw a sign indicating that Sydney Buses is soon going to do a trial where the M10 bus service has wireless internet on board for six months. This was a simultaneous ‘yay!’ and ‘ohhh’ moment for me. The former because it’s a great idea we should be getting into, and the second because, well, wireless internet as a means of encouraging public transport use was an idea I came up with about nine months ago and have been meaning to write about ever since. Now I look like I’m jumping a bandwagon rather than demonstrating leadership, but that ship has sailed (particularly if it’s a ferry).

In any case, I think the trial is a great idea – possibly one that could have been better initiated, but good regardless. I think it would have been better to do the trial on a train or ferry service, where people are usually on the vehicle for longer and it’s a steadier ride, and therefore more conducive to internet usage. I also think it should be trialled across more than one bus service in case there’s something very specific about the M10 that affects the way people use it. Still, internet on public transport is a good idea in my book. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 24-02-2011, 8 user comments

The day the lights went out in Overland

Gin_and_Tonic_with_ingredients – notfromUtrechtImagine my shock, horror and dismay when I went online to get my Overland fix and got absolutely, wtf, nothing. That’s if you don’t count a message, repeating ad infinitum, that my connection had timed out.

Quick to self-blame for technology stuff-ups, I gave myself over to a number of scenarios: had I clicked something accidentally with my newly acquired acrylic nail extensions (French polish, if you must know), did I have a virus (well yes, I’d had a nasty dose of summer flu but this time round it was my computer’s questionable state of immunity causing the V&Ds), or was this simply a sign my laptop was dying and the blue screen of death imminent? ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 24-02-2011, 11 user comments

On the sacking of Jason Dowling

Jason Dowling has been sacked. Not for behaving badly at work, but for behaving badly in his own spare time. Jason posted some offensive comments on Facebook, was dobbed in to his boss by a stranger who happened to stumble upon his page and then given his marching orders. What’s the world coming to?

It’s not the first time bad behaviour outside of work hours has resulted in dismissal. As early as the late nineties, a Telstra employee was sacked for getting into a fight while at after-work drinks. The Commission member found that ‘employers do not have an unfettered right to sit in judgement on the out of work behaviour of their employees’. Vice-President Ross went on to say that ‘an employee’s behaviour outside of working hours will only have an impact on their employment to the extent that it can be said to breach an express or implied term of his or her contract of employment’. The VP must have thought that getting into a fight outside of hours wasn’t mentioned as a no-no in the employment contract. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 23-02-2011, 4 user comments

On waking up

2010-2011_Arab_world_protests.PNG: *Arab League: Serg!oEgypt. A revolution on the scale of the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Women’s Revolution. Millions are changing everything because they can’t bear the oppression any longer; because they’ve captured the imagination of another way.

Iran, Yemen, Bahrain … Egypt’s imagination inspired by Tunisia. Tunisia inspired by … Facebook? Well, clearly Facebook is just one moment in a long history. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 22-02-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: On participatory revolution

Egypt and twitterLast week media theorist and writer Jay Rosen coined a new genre; ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’, it’s called. The genre takes some knowns:

• Since the invention of social media there have been uprisings and revolutions: Iran, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and more

• Social media helps ‘sex up’ the reporting of these situations through its dynamism, immediacy, on-the-ground reporting

• Some ‘get carried away’ by the sexing up, mistaking it for journalism

• Some others get worried about all this focus on social media as ‘revolution’, so have to remind people that ‘it’s not that simple’

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-02-2011, 11 user comments